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Show heatmap: 3 things I learned from using Hotjar

Your site visitors are not converting because you don’t know how they navigate your website.

The fact

You change the color, increase the button size, move the image, and hope to do everything to get better results.

However, sometimes this is not how site visitors see your website. And you won’t be able to clearly optimize the site in the end.

How Hotjar works

Hotjar is a great tool that can help you understand how people click, move, and scroll your website.

By merging data in a heat map format, you can better position content, prioritize structure, and provide the most appropriate user experience.

I have used Hotjar for a long time. It's always a go-to-tool for quick UX modification.

My site performance

During my recent launch of VenturesList, I learned three things. These insights helped me optimize from top to bottom:

  • Freemium vs premium call-to-action has about twice the number of clicks
  • The most active part of my product is the investor category 40.5%
  • More than 41.8% of site visitors will reach the price section

See my website in action: ventureslist.com

Sample size: 1,000 visits history

What next for you?

Remember, this is not a benchmark, and the data will vary depending on your product, content, industry, and user behavior.

Always measure data from the beginning and optimize it gradually.

  1. 2

    You're right Felix. Early stage startups/projects shouldn't care about the details of buttons of which picture to use. It is all about the storytelling of the entire site, whether it is easy to understand or not. The book StoryBrand talks about this well, I learn a lot. Hope it helps other people too :)

    1. 1

      Totally! More storytelling helps. I'm leaning towards spending more time to optimize content rather than a button.

  2. 1

    I personally use the self-hosted tool called userTrack from one guy here on IH, @XCS
    It combines the main Hotjar functions AND basic visitor statistics, visits, countries etc. For me it's a win-win, saving monthly on external services (and not giving privacy to 3rd party), less queries on page load, better loading time that I would have if I would use the same functionality from different services, it's good optimized.

    There are a few quirks since recently the whole script is overhauled and practically remade from scratch to be even better than the first version I bought few years ago, but regular updates are coming and fixing the bugs so I am delighted to have it .

    For usage, for me the most useful function is being able to replay a visitor sessions (sometimes even watch them in real time)... it is tremendously helpful to see mouse movements, clicks, hovering over elements, to see how visitors are going around the pages, how long they read specific parts of text, how much attention is given to specific parts of the content, etc.

    Other excellent feature is the heatmap of clicks, it really helps to see what users are clicking and let you figure out why they are clicking there. For example, on one of my pages I have had several blog posts as recommendation for further reading, and a lot of clicks was made on the thumbnail images of those posts. They were not-linkable images, just images, but people were "trained" on many other websites that clicking on image opens the article related to that image so they were clicking on them. So of course, I made those thumbnails linkable to their articles, and improved visitor experience.

    Similar tests and fixing can be done with button colors, positions of image vs text chunks through the page, etc, you can literally see what people are doing and make the surfing easier for them, increasing their engagement, time on page, satisfaction overall.

    1. 1

      Hi Dotz,

      Thanks for the nice review of userTrack! I am glad you find it platform useful!

      For me the most useful feature is actually the visitors list, having a quick look at the pages visited individually by each user let's me easily understand what users are doing on my site and how long they there. I like the ability to quickly switch between an overview of the stats, to seeing a list of visitors, to seeing a specific visit playback or heatmap for a custom category of users.

      Thanks a lot for the kind words and I will try to release some cool new upates soon!

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